Transcript:
Hey, guys, J here again. This is video number three and my Lightsaber’s 101 video series and for this one we’re gonna try and focus on the internals, the for an installed lightsaber and what to expect around how that saber is going to be installed. What what constitutes a good install and we’ll dive in a little bit about some of the capabilities around some sound boards without getting too technical? I really want to focus on some of the internal components how they go together and what you should be expecting either from company Buy from or from an installer that you commissioned to to get you a lightsaber. I’ve done a couple videos in the past that have shown what a bad install looks like and to kind of reiterate a little bit. A bad install is gonna be something that doesn’t make use of one a good chassis or a good chassis type system to just poor wiring, cheap components skim. You can just start to tell when when you’re skimping on things or frankly, just just the wrong stuff, you know, you paid for something, and you got something else. And there’s different levels of what we would call bad and poor installs going back in time before 3d printed chassis. Zoar machine Delrin chasse! These are things were you know commonly used? It was more or less the accepted methodology that you would strap a sound board on the back of a battery somehow and basically put a speaker at the end and run your wiring up to your switches and your and your LED and call it a day. Some companies have been using that type of installation even up until fairly recently. I’ll give you an example of what that kind of looks like. I’ve taken the shrink wrap off of here, but this is basically the internals of what something like that looks like as you can see. We’ve got just a loose speaker hanging, and here’s our battery and I sound bored sitting up here and they’re wiring coming off now. This was to be fair. This was wrapped in shrink wrap and you know, was insulated. So none of this was actually going to hit the inside of the hilt, so I wouldn’t call. This necessarily a bad insult, just a poor install one. That could definitely be done better functionally. This is good! This was gonna work just fine, but it wasn’t, you know, probably up to the level of standards that we would really accept in the community today for what we would call good install a bad install version, This would be just insert this, frankly and into a hill he sold. Sir, he’s ultra mental, they conduct electricity, so having a bunch of bare electronics in there, not a good idea, and I’ve had some installs that I’ve had to fix up coming to me. That have been like that, and it’s just, it’s just sad when somebody pays money for for something like that. Well, you should be expecting, and I’m gonna use an excuse. The kind of rudimentary look of this because this is just a test bed chassis that I use for testing stuff outside of a hilt, so it’s a little a little bit messy, but is something along these lines in Donnellys. You’re gonna have some form of a chassis, which is going to hold all of your components together. It’s gonna hold all the wiring and again, even though this is kind of messy down here because I constantly rewire this thing for different test setups. You can see that the wires are still safely tucked in this channel here, and you know, although all our main components are nice and secured in here and this, something like this is what you should be expecting internally in a lightsaber, That’s going to keep the components secure. It’s going to keep them from touching the inside of the hilt, and if it’s wired properly, it’s also going to make sure that the you know, none of the wiring is getting stripped or pulled out or maybe rubbing on something and there’s different types of Cassies and it really depends on the type of saber. You can have what? I call a floating chassis. Which is something like this saber here. This is a saber. It comes from Saber forge to help, but this has been installed with a any see spark to board. This has what? I call floating chassis, so this is a chassis that there’s basically a wiring harness that goes up in here, which keeps this thing from sliding all the way out but to get access to the soundboard. I do need to be able to pull this out, so that’s. Why this floats, so the wiring in here is been done to the exact length so that when this gets pushed in and the palm will get screwed back on that wiring harness is going to coil up in here and provide some resistance, so the chassis actually isn’t going to be bouncing around and moving around, but it’s also not so long that this chassis is just going to fall out the end. So if you have a sabre, that’s like this commonly, you’re going to see Sabre Forge ultra sabers Vader’s vault savers. I think a lot of Genesis, custom sabers and plenty of other ones out. There have a design like this. That is more than likely going to incorporate some type of floating chassis system and that’s perfectly fine and OK as long as it is wired. Well, and you want to make sure that whoever is building that for you wherever you bought it from has a nice one or more braids, so the wire is actually coiled up along itself, forms a nice, strong, strong bundle of wire so that if this thing’s moving around, you slide it out, it’s not just going to rip some wiring right out and again. One of the ways to make sure is that is to ask for pictures or to make sure that you’re going with a company that isn’t afraid to show you pictures of their wiring, and if, and ask, ask an installer. I mean, if you’re getting a custom, you know your spend hundreds. Sometimes thousands of dollars to get a custom built saver unless you’ve worked with that person many times. I mean, that as for some pictures of their wiring, What’s it look like? Be wary of anybody who has all kinds of cool pictures of you know, Lightsabers all lit up and stuff on there on their website or a Facebook page but never shows any examples of the wiring that they do. Yeah, that’s probably not going to be the focus of their page, but there should be some examples on there. It’s not the coolest thing to look at unless you actually are an installer, and you’d like to see other people’s wiring, which I do, but you should. You should at least see some examples of that on their site Because that’s going to tell you. Hey, this person knows more or less what they’re doing. So that’s what you should be expecting, And there’s different levels of where jassi’s can go. I mean, this guy right here, like said, this is my test bed that I do outside of a Sabre. But, you know, this is a 7/8 inch Sassy’s so this would go into a. I believe this was a obi-wan. Kenobi Chasse Ease. Or maybe k4 I can’t remember exactly which, but either way this would go into a hilt that has a 7/8 inch inner diameter, and hilts have various different sizes. You have different sizes of Chasse ease! This one is one point. One two inches in diameter. So this chassis is thicker and bigger and you can move on up to more elaborate jassi’s things that can incorporate crystal chambers. They can be made out of metal in some cases. It really just depends on what the lightsaber is. What its capabilities are its size dimensions. What you’re putting into it and frankly, how much you’re willing to spend as far as what kind of chances you can throw in there? Jeff, these can be both big and small. Give an example of one here. So this is a this lightsaber is a obi-wan. Kenobi, a new hope replica from Roman Protestant MK 1 This is a chassis by Dmitri Stock out of out of Moscow, Dimitri and Rick do Rio from Goth redesigns. Make a lot of really fantastic, 3d printed. Jesse’s designs. There’s some other folks out there as well, but these probably two most well-known. This is an example of one of Dimitris Jesse’s designed specifically for this and this lightsaber. I just love showing this guy off. So it’s wise in this video. But this also incorporates a custom machined crystal chamber up at the top and this all fits together inside there. So this is an example of getting on sort of that extreme, and this is still plastic printed down here. This is all metal up here. There are, you’ll see some. I haven’t built one of these. It’s on my to-do list, but just a shoot cost as a reason why I haven’t built one, but you can get all metal chassis that are really cool. Look, and most of those are for Graflex style savers and get very expensive you can easily spend close to $1,000 just on the parts for the chances, so not being made of money. That’s why I haven’t got myself. One why, you know, even not spending a whole lot of money. You can still get some cool stuff. You know, this is a chassis is from. Gothams so it’s called a Knight. Jassi’s goes into a core Banth 2.0 Graflex replica. It’s, uh yeah. This is still plastic, but there’s you know some brass rods in here metal. That’s all didn’t custom painted, so it looks pretty cool, but again. If you look here, you know, you’re not seeing a bunch of wires hanging out. It’s clean. The install has been done so that everything is exactly where it should be and how it should be in there and it’s functional. What you don’t want is to have something that you know. You’ve got kind of just wires going everywhere because something’s gonna get snagged and caught at some point on something. You certainly don’t want you. Don’t want to see electrical tape everywhere. There is an installation called heat shrink, which comes a lot of different sizes. That stuff goes around wires to provide insulation. You can get different colors and get it clear, even so that’s fine to use. I’m gonna show you example of electrical tape and heat shrink all done on the same thing. This came! This is not am I doing? This is from a from a company, but so these resistors here that are going down to LED. They’re actually wrapped in heat shrink, which is great, that’s good and up top electrical tape, so this really should be heat shrink, so I’m bad Install Mm-hmm is more than likely gonna have a whole lot of electrical tape in there. So if you open up your saber or you see, pictures of some sabers of somebody’s doing and there’s a whole bunch of electrical tape and just kind of wires everywhere, and you know, Red flag should start going off. I mean, this thing here like I said, I have rewired this thing. I don’t know how many times all kinds of spices in here. This is not the proudest thing for me to be showing off. As far as you know, clean wiring goes but even as messy as this is. I mean, this is still, you know, relatively clean install. What were you where you can run into? Some problems again is where you have somebody that is gonna not gonna be forthcoming about about the wiring and I can’t stress that enough. I’m just gonna keep reiterating that. Look for pictures of wiring. Get examples. You know, it’s perfectly okay. If somebody hasn’t built a particular saber before they’re not % familiar with a particular jassi’s if they’ve been have any experience whatsoever doing this? I mean, a lot of the you know, a lot of the things work the same. Some of the wiring is more or less the same. It just boils down to. How do you route the wires itself? So that’s so it can be okay to say to ask them. Hey, have you ever built one of these before in? They go, you know what? I haven’t, but I absolutely. Could you know if you run into that situation? Make sure that that person, you know, look at some other examples of other work that they’ve done and make sure that, you know, they know their way around building and building a life saver, so having beat that horse to death. Do you want to talk about just a little bit about the sound boards? Because these this is are the heart and brains of of your. Sabre, one thing to bear in mind is not every sound board’s gonna fit in every single same room. Probably the only two that really do are going to be the Nano biscotti and it’s a little brother. The Pico crumble, which is just a smidge, smaller but doesn’t have the SD card and doesn’t have doesn’t have all the same features on there. Obviously, the smaller, the soundboard probably the less capabilities that it has not to say it’s necessarily a bad light saver. I have some of my collection that have nano Biscotti’s in them, but bear in mind that you know a crystal focus is, you know, not gonna fit in a 7/8 inch lifesaver at least not without some heavy modifications, so when you are thinking about getting a saver built or buying one under, you need to begin to understand what are some of the size limitations around the hilt and not just necessarily the thickness, but also the length available as well. Some helps have very so this one looks pretty long, but in actuality. I’ve only got about this much room for all the brains, because I’ve got a bunch of. I got a switch and recharge port up here, which stick down so I can’t really, you know, run a battery up through there or the soundboard, and then the LED is just sitting right up here, so I’ve got maybe an inch or room between the switch section and the LED, so it’s not really ruined for any components in there, so I really only got about this Four-inch section and it is not that easy to do a really well wired clean install in that small amount of space, especially when you’re talking with a large board and this actually uses a large board. This uses a spark to board, which is just slightly on the smaller side than a crystal focus and this board’s actually about that long. So keep that in mind when you’re commissioning a saver and also when you’re thinking about some of the capabilities that you want in that saver. If you want like a really fancy crystal reveal, and you know, you want the you want a crystal focus and we’re just touch on this real quick. So though by default, most soundboards. I’m gonna use into somebody, So here’s a prism. Here’s a nano biscotti. You saw the spark – in here. Use what are what are call single cell. That means they run off of a single battery and these guys are rated at 3.7 volts. All right, A crystal focus, however, is rated for seven point four volts, so it is dual cell meaning by default. Unless you hack this thing, which there you can do, but you do this Some capabilities on there you’re going to later, but by default, this thing requires two batteries in what’s called. Sirius so you get seven point four volts out of it now! If you want to have the same runtime capability, you need two of these guys. Obviously it gives you an idea of how much space that takes up. You can put a shorter dual cell battery. That’s about this size in that, but it’s gonna have like a quarter of the actual power available, so you’re going to not have the same kind of runtime that you might with a larger battery pack, so it’s also something to think about that might be okay in a lightsaber that we call a shelf. Queen, so what’s a shelf Queen? So a shelf? Queen is really a light server. That’s just meant to sit on a shelf for display purposes. Maybe pick it up and play around with a little bit again. Some of that my mk1. Here, this is a shelf. Queen, that would never go duel with this. But, you know, this is an expensive saver. A lot of time invested into it money as well. This has an 18 500 single cell battery in there, which is smaller than this. It’s about two-thirds of the size, so it doesn’t have quite the same runtime capability, but you can get, but there’s there’s some folks who like to get flex done that have incredibly elaborate Crystal Chamber Jassis and want the full RGB capability of a crystal focus with the the Color Extender Satellite board in there and because of the chassis and everything that’s going in there, you know, you’ve got basically a dual dual battery that’s actually just slightly smaller than this, and you know, you can end up with like less than half our total runtime on that thing, which again might be fine for a first shelf queen that you’re just gonna pick up and play with for five or ten minutes at a time, it’s mostly just meant to sit there and look really pretty, but if you’re expecting to have something like that, you want to go what we call trooping or go down to a con. That’s that’s not going to cut it, So that’s one of the decisions that mean that you need to think about when you’re either Purchasing a saber or getting a commission is. What are your power requirements? You know how how long you want this thing to run for a couple hours? Three hours, four hours. Maybe I mean, those things are all certainly possible, but they’re gonna dictate. What what kind of sound boards are gonna work? What kind of chassis is gonna work? And frankly, you know whether or not the help that you want to put it in is going to be big enough or have the capabilities to support that so all things for you to think about and consider, so there’s a lot that goes into building a a well built lightsaber. Lots of things to think about. There’s people out there that think you know anybody who’s you know? Relatively experienced abilities should be able to pump out any lightsaber in an hour or two, and that’s just not the case, not if it’s built. Well, yeah. I can build a again. This guy is pretty basic here, but I can build a basic saber, Not counting any weathering or anything, you know, in an hour or two, depending on what’s in it, that’s a basic saver, You know, you might some with a crystal chamber and, you know, high runtime or something or fancy sound board. I mean, the time scale just starts going up because there’s a lot of thought that needs to go into how it’s built the components that are going into it. And frankly, there’s there needs to be a lot of interaction between. You know, the person building that for you and you being the end recipient there, So hopefully this again like all of my videos. Hopefully that’s been informative. Not sure what the next video is gonna be about yet. I’m still thinking on. It might wait another day or so to make it, but hopefully this first three have been have been good so far and people are learning things. Thanks, guys.